Authors: Don Lattin
Jesus Freaks (3 page)
That person was Sue Kauten. Sue was a trusted member of the Unit, the inner circle of Family leaders and a small group of children born into that elite fold. The whereabouts of the Unit had always been top secret. Most rank-and-file members of The Family never laid eyes on David Berg or Karen Zerby. The Unit traveled around the world, relocating every few years, teaching their far-flung flock
through a constant stream of letters, prophecies, and other communiqués. The Unit was a cult within the cult. It was the testing ground for Berg's sexual, social, and spiritual experiments. Ricky was the primary experiment.
Ricky grew up in the surreal world of the Unit and remained a member of The Family through his early twenties. By 2001, Ricky was fed up and increasingly angry about all the child sexual abuse he had witnessed in the Unit. But he had lost track of the Unit's location since he'd defected and publicly denounced The Family.
Over the past year, however, Ricky sent a series of signals to his estranged mother that he wanted to reconcile. But his real goal was not reconciliation. It was extermination. Ricky had watched as other members of the second generation tried to redress their grievances and get justice through law enforcement, the courts, or the news media. Nothing seemed to work. Nobody seemed to care.
His videotape was a call to arms. Ricky was not just angry with those Family leaders who committed sexual, physical, and spiritual abuse upon the children of The Family. He was also fed up with the refusal of other second-generation critics to take direct action against the sect. Like the priest in
Boondock Saints
, Ricky was frustrated about that more insidious form of evilâthe
indifference of good men.
It happened right before me. It happened to all of you. Thousands of us, some worse than others. I had it good in many ways. I didn't get fucked in the ass, you know, I was a guy. A lot of you girls, phew, crap, I can't even compare my stories with yours. But that's not what this is about. We're not sitting here comparing, “Oh you got it worse than I did. You got it more times than I did.” It's not about that. There's so many other kinds of abuse that went on, that to some of us was just as bad, to some of us it wasn't, and some of us didn't have it that bad. So I'm not gonna sit here and say, “Oh yeah, I had it the worst or I didn't” because it really doesn't matter. It should never have happened at all. To anybody. That's the point.
Ricky had been fine-tuning his plans for months. It was a time when much of the nation's attention had been directed at the 2004 presidential campaign between Republican incumbent George W. Bush and his Democrat challenger, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Both candidates spent a lot of time promising America that they would be tough on international terrorists. On this night, after the election but two weeks before the second Bush inauguration in January 2005, Ricky made a similar vow to his second-generation constituency of Family survivors. I feel like we're in a war here. Uh, it's not necessarily a literal warâlike I'm making itâbut it's a war nonetheless.
I feel like everyone of us who has left and in some way speaks outâin some way tries to help somebodyâin some way tries to help ourselvesâum, is a soldier in this war. It's a war on terror because these fuckers are the real terrorists. You know, Bush and Kerry get up there on their campaign platforms, and they both talk about how they're gonna hunt down Al-Qaeda terrorists and kill 'em. And kill 'em! That's what they said! “Hunt them down and kill 'em.”
Well, you know, my question is, you know, what about these fuckin' perverts? You knowâaren't they the real terrorists? Terrorizing little kids. Driving them to suicide. Isn't that like murdering them, basically? You fuck with their minds so much that they can't go on. They really can't go on.
Ricky's plan was to hunt down and kill as many of those terrorists as possible. He'd heard rumors that his mother and Peter Amsterdam had returned to the United States. He wasn't sure where they'd landed, but one place he could find at least some Family leaders was at a compound hidden in the woods outside Dulzura, Californiaâjust east of San Diego. That was the headquarters of The Family Care Foundation, one of the sect's front groups and one of the last places Ricky stayed before leaving the fold.
There was another reason to cross the Arizona border to hunt down more prey. Ricky thoughtâmistakenly, it turns outâthat committing
crimes in two states would draw the FBI into the case and finally get federal authorities to investigate the crimes of The Family. It's unclear where he got this idea, but one of the more memorable characters in
Boondock Saints
is Paul Smecker, a charismatic, almost mystical FBI agent played by actor Willem Dafoe. Ricky had gotten to know at least one federal agent, an officer with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service who practiced at the Tucson firing range where Ricky took a gun safety course and got a concealed weapons permit. The last thing Ricky wanted was to have police caught in the crossfire when he gunned down his mother and her lover.
Nowâthere is one problem thoughâand that is, that as I go on my merry way, I am not going to, ah, hurt, or try to hurt, any law enforcement. Now that's going to be really tough to do this without doing that. Um, but that's where I draw the line. I'm not gonna hurt them. I'm not gonna try to hurt them. I respect law enforcement. Um, the justice system has let us down. However, those cops are out there putting their lives on the line for us, and I must say, um, yeah there's some fucked-up cops out there, but I'm thankful for them, and I respect them.
On this first Saturday night in 2005, no agent of the state stopped Ricky at the state line. No one noticed his bloody pants on the floor and ordered him out of the car. He made it to California.
Ricky would have gotten there sooner if he hadn't roared past the junction of Interstate 10 and Interstate 8, missing the most direct route from Tucson to San Diego. But the avenging prophet had blood on his hands and a lot on his mind. His own Battle of Armageddon had begun, and the ghosts of his life and those of his spiritual father were already too much to take. He had missed the Interstate 8 turnoff in Casa Grande, Arizona, which just happens to be where the story begins.
Virginia Brandt Berg, 1885â1969.
DAVID BERG WAS
a preacher's kid.
His mother, Virginia Brandt Berg, was a radio evangelist and itinerant preacher. Mama Berg made her name in the Pentecostal revival that began in a little church in Los Angeles and swept across the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. Virginia rode the great revival from northern California to southern Florida, where she billed herself as the “Miracle Woman” and packed thousands into her most successful church operationâthe Gospel Tabernacle of Miami.
Virginia was a preacher's kid herself. She was the daughter of the Reverend John Lincoln Brandt, a wealthy Methodist preacher. Brandt joined the Campbellites, a Christian restoration movement that sought a return to the perceived purity of the church described in the New Testament. The teachings of Alexander Campbell (1788â1866) and his distrust of church government inspired the movement and can be seen a century later in David Berg's condemnation of organized Christianity, something he and his mother called “churchianity.”
Religious purity inspired David and Virginia's ancestorsâthree brothers named Adam, Isaac, and Jacob Brandtâto sail to the American colonies in 1745. They were Jews from Stuttgart, Germany, who to their parents' horror converted to the Christian faith. Disowned by their clan, Adam, Isaac, and Jacob brought their new faith to the New World as farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They were part of a Mennonite sect known as the Brethren or “the Dunkers,” so named because of their insistence on total immersion during the rite of baptism.
John Lincoln Brandt, a descendent of Isaac Brandt, was born in 1860 in Somerset, Ohio. David Brandt Berg would later write that his grandfather “was always a fighter, too, and I guess that's where I get a little bit of it. He was always fighting the Catholics or the Mormons, or in politics or something.”
The Catholics burnt down his house in Toledo; the Mormons shot at him in Utah; and he was always right up in the thick of it somewhere, fighting something. But I never heard that he ever accomplished much with all that fighting. I don't know that that's any great advantage. I think he'd accomplished more by just loving them. But that was his way of loving them. He was trying to fight off the System that they were in and trying to keep the sheep in, and he packed the people in. He was colorful and dramatic and he really packed 'em in by the thousands in his church. He was also a gambler; he loved to gamble, and he had a stock market tickertape right in the office of his church, so he could keep up with the stock market. That's the way he made his three million dollars, and in those days, that was worth about ten times as much as it would be today.
So my grandfather became very rich as a result of his investments in the stock market, his books, his travels and tours. He could think of more ways of making money than a dog has fleas. It was just born in him, he was Jewish to the core. And even as a preacher he figured out ways of makin' money.
1
John Lincoln Brandt married Nina Marquis, who came from an old Indiana family that claimed Daniel Boone as one of its ancestors.
John and Nina had five children, including David's mother, Virginia, who was born on May 27, 1886, in Ronceverte, West Virginia.
Virginia Brandt Berg's own ministry began with the Florence Crittenton Mission, a national network of homes for wayward girls. That's also how she met her husband, Hjalmer Berg, a striking Swedish tenor who had come to perform at a Crittenton Home social event held in Virginia's honor in Ogden, Utah.
Hjalmer was born into a large, poor family in southern Sweden. His father was a shoe cobbler. Before they immigrated to America, his family made extra money during the summer in Sweden as wandering minstrels putting on musical and acrobatic shows. Hjalmer kept up that tradition in the United States, where he got a job as a bookkeeper for the Southern Pacific Railroad but earned additional income as a concert singer on summer tours.
Inspired by his famous father-in-law, the Reverend John L. Brandt, Hjalmer Berg interrupted his railroad job, went to a seminary in Iowa, and was ordained a minister in the Disciples of Christ, a Protestant denomination that grew out of the antidenominationalism of the Campbellites. He and Virginia moved to northern California when Hjalmer landed a job as the pastor of a Disciples of Christ congregation in Ukiah, a lumber and farming community north of San Francisco.
David was the youngest of Virginia and Hjalmer's three children, and as his mother tells the story, he should never have been born.
On Christmas morning, 1911, his mother was on her way home from the hospital with her first son, Hjalmer Berg Jr. Christmas had always been her favorite day of the year, and this day seemed no different as she rode home in the morning light. Then, without warning, tragedy stuck. Virginia was thrown from her carriage onto a curbstone, breaking her back in two places. “How strangely God works,” she would later write in her most famous sermon. “How swiftly, unexpectedly, tragedy can walk across life's path.”
2
Her next five years, or so the story goes, were full of agony, pain, suffering, and despair. She was paralyzed from the waist down, lying on rubber cushions, her face gaunt, her body emaciated. She and her husband had long prayed for her suffering to end, and then, on a Saturday
morning in 1916, Virginia woke up in the bedroom of their home. “At that very moment I was healed! The paralysis had gone from my body! I felt cool and rested and sat upright in bed.”
On the following Sunday morning, to the amazement of the Ukiah congregation, Virginia Brandt Berg walked into the sanctuary of her husband's church. It was a journey she would later describe in her sermon, “From Deathbed to Pulpit,” a story that would launch Virginia's career as one of the nation's first woman evangelists and host of a pioneering Gospel radio show called “Meditation Moments.”
David would learn the tricks of the traveling evangelists at his mother's side. Tricks, or at least a few lies, had found their way into Virginia's famous sermon. Deborah Berg, Virginia's granddaughter and David's oldest child, would later point out that the famous lady evangelist had been attending graduate school at Texas Christian University and having her second child during the five years she claimed to have been a bedridden invalid in Ukiah. That child, the couple's only daughter, ran away from home and eloped at age sixteen. Hjalmer Jr. turned away from the church and became an atheist. That left young David as the only child to continue Virginia's evangelical career.
David Brandt Berg was born in Oakland, California, on February 18, 1919.
“At first he was a fat and robust little fellow,” his mother wrote in a letter to a friend. “But I overfed him [breast milk]âI had such a quantityâand he developed bowel trouble. Day and night he had the colic too, and I was just worn out! I had no one to relieve me.”
3
Her letter, written in the spring of 1919, credits a local faith healer for the baby's recovery. “At last I carried the little fellow to a mission in the city where an elder I knew prayed for him,” she wrote. “The next morning he had the first natural bowel movement since his sickness began, and he has been alright ever since.”
At the time, Virginia was on her own. There had been a falling out with the Disciples of Christ in Ukiah. Many of its members were wary of the miracle stories and faith healing testimonies that had become the center of Virginia and Hjalmer's ministry. They lost the pulpit in Ukiah, and Hjalmer was back out on the road working for the Southern Pacific Railroad. There had been some possible church jobs back
east, but he and Virginia were quickly losing faith in the established churches.
“The old-line church will not accept our message,” she wrote.
Virginia and her husband were caught up in the fiery spirit of the early Pentecostal movement, which had been sweeping the nation since a series of revival meetings held in Los Angeles between 1906 and 1909. It all started in the City of Angels in a little church on Azusa Street. Today, more than a century later, the Pentecostal movement counts more than 580 million adherents around the world and has come to see the Azusa Street revival as the spark that set the Holy Spirit ablaze.
Established church leaders in mainline Protestant denominations like the Methodists, Lutherans, and Disciples of Christ were wary of the faith healers, snake handlers, and freelance prophets in the Pentecostal movement. They spoke in strange tongues. They danced in church. They fell to the floor when touched by the power of the Holy Spirit. Many Americans laughed at the “holy rollers” and saw this new wave of religious fervor as little more than a carnival sideshow.
Equally scandalous to the churchmen of the day were women at the pulpit. Aimee Semple McPherson, a Pentecostal pioneer and founder of the International Church of the Four Square Gospel, was the best known of the flock and a role model for Virginia's ministry. She and Hjalmer left the Disciples of Christ for the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a less restrictive network of evangelical preachers, and took their show on the road.
Their ministry, the Berg Evangelistic Dramatic Company, arrived in Miami in March of 1925. They started with a tent and a year later opened a 4,500-seat auditorium, the Gospel Tabernacle. Newspaper advertisements for their revivals featured pictures of Virginia and Hjalmer. She was billed as “The Miracle Woman” and “A Modern Prophetess.” Her husband was listed as “Campaign Director” and “Song Leader.” Attendees were promised a “soul-stirring, heart-warming revival of New Testament Religion.”
Not everyone loved the Miracle Woman. On the night of July 24, 1926, someone threw a piece of coral through the window of the Miami church and struck Virginia just as she was about to begin her nightly service. According to the police, the unidentified assailant was
a man upset that two young girls had joined Mrs. Berg's church. It was a strange incidentâforeshadowing the opposition David Berg would encounter decades later from parents upset that their children had joined his sect. Just days before the attack, Virginia received threatening letters warning her to get out of town or face a fate more serious than “another well known evangelist of the same faith experienced.”
4
That was an obvious reference to Aimee Semple McPherson, who presided over the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple on the other side of the country, in southern California. McPherson disappeared in May 1926. She later resurfaced, claiming to have been kidnapped. But according to numerous media reports at the time, McPherson had used the kidnapping story to cover up the fact that she'd really been “shacked up” in a romantic “love nest.”
Little David was six years old when his mother's troupe landed in Miami. Some of his earliest memories are not of revival meetings but of his mother constantly scolding him for playing with himself. Virginia went to great lengths to break her son's bad habit, including one terrifying time when Mama Berg walked into her son's room and “caught me playing with it again.” Here is Berg's own account of what happened:
I suppose she thought she was going to make me so ashamed that I wouldn't do it anymore. So she brought in the whole familyâ¦my governess whom I didn't even like anyhow, and my brother and sister, scolding me before all! She brought a washbasin, a little bowl and a knife and she told me she was going to cut it off! Oh, I was terrified! I was absolutely petrified! I almost never forgave my mother for that, threatening to cut it off and embarrassing me in front of the family. But that didn't stop me. It felt too good to quit! I just kept it up in secret, my terrible secret sin.
5
Berg tells another childhood story about a Mexican babysitter named Maria “who used to suck me to sleep for my nap every afternoon.”
I had orgasms and I really enjoyed it. I always got nice and relaxed and went to sleep right after. So I got started liking sex at an early age. But my mother was not very progressive. She
finally decided she wanted to see what made me want to take a nap every afternoon.
So she snuck in and took a peak and she found Maria sucking me! She slapped the poor little Mexican girl out of the house! Because Mom had been taught, like all other little “good” kids are taught, that it's
naughty
! I don't know what was naughty about it? I enjoyed it! It worked great!
Look at me, I don't think it did me any harm. Of course if you'd ask any of my enemies they'd say, “Aha, see! That's what made him such a sex maniac!”
6
Meanwhile, Virginia Brandt Berg's ministry had hit the big time. But not for long. It all came crashing down the following year when her church was destroyed by a hurricane that tore through Miami in September 1926. Virginia raised money to rebuild but then had a fight with one of her financial backers. She regrouped and moved into downtown Miami to start the Church of the Open Door in a two-story building across the street from City Hall. She could still pack the place, but the glory days were over.
